Cold-comfort ruling for sex trafficker

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Juan Doss will probably spend the rest of his life in prison for transporting two teenage girls across state lines to work as prostitutes in Oakland, San Francisco, Reno and other cities. So he’ll have plenty of time to contemplate a rare legal victory: a federal appeals court’s ruling that he had the right to discourage his wife from testifying against him.

Doss, of Reno, was convicted in 2006 of sex trafficking, transporting minors into prostitution and two counts of witness-tampering. Prosecutors in federal court in Riverside said Doss and his wife conspired in 2005 to recruit the two girls, ages 14 and 16, and set them up as prostitutes in the Bay Area, Sacramento and Reno. Doss was sentenced to life because of a previous conviction in Nevada for pandering.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld most of the verdict this week, although before ratifying the life sentence it asked a judge to make sure the Nevada victim had indeed been a minor. But the court overturned the witness-tampering conviction that involved Doss’ wife, Jacquay Ford of Sacramento.

Ford, who also faced charges in the case, wasn’t called as a witness in Doss’ first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Doss then sent her three letters urging her to remain silent — as he put it, “I would expect you to hold strong and say NO that you won’t even get on the stand.”

Unbeknownst to Doss, Ford had agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. She testified against her husband at his retrial and wound up with a guilty plea and a 15-month sentence. She also turned over the letters, which became the basis of the tampering charge.

But the appeals court said the tampering law requires proof that the defendant “corruptly persuaded” a witness to withhold testimony. And there’s nothing corrupt about asking one’s spouse to keep quiet, the court said, because the law allows husbands and wives to refuse to testify against one another.

Without evidence that Doss threatened Ford or asked her to lie, his request “was insufficient to establish ‘corrupt’ as opposed to innocent persuasion,” the court said.

The ruling won’t affect Doss’ sentence on the sex-trafficking charges. And the court upheld his conviction for tampering with another witness, the 14-year-old girl, saying there was evidence that he had pressured her not to testify.